ARCHITECTURAL RECORD has asked me to state both what
troubles me most and what pleases me most in the status of architecture
in the United States.

In the May issue of 1937
shortly after I had entered this, my adopted country, for good, ARCHITECTURAL
RECORD published a statement about my general intentions as newly-appointed
Harvard Professor of Architecture. I emphasized that "it should be our
highest aim to produce a type of architect who is able, to visualize an
entity rather than let himself get absorbed into the narrow channels of
specialization . . . to make way for the man of vision."

Have we made any progress towards this goal? Indeed
we have. During the last twenty years, a young American generation of
talented architects has come to the fore--among them, I am proud to say,
many of my own former students whose achievements show definite signs
of a growing coherence and kinship of the American architectural idiom.
Comparing publications on European architecture with those on American
design, the latter stands out; in its generally more direct, fresh and
flexible solutions, less inhibited, less tempered by prejudice. In a country
that is blessed with abundance, an enviable array of technical means offers
opportunities for daring experiments, and this challenge has been enthusiastically
met.

What a contrast to the early days when we struggled
with the first letters of the new architectural alphabet, hemmed in on
all sides by colossal prejudices and barely able to surmount, the technical
difficulties that beset, all attempts at creating new, unprecedented forms
for living. We were lonely fighters with insufficient equipment, with
uncertain allies, and practical demonstrations of our ideas were few and
far between.

Now, when a new generation is able to use the architectural
language of the twentieth century as a matter of course, when prejudice
has died down and a building program is in progress that supersedes any
expectation, we architects find ourselves still at a fair distance from
our desired goal: the transformation of our chaotic, profusely growing
surroundings into a pattern of organic entity and visual bliss. For such
a desire has hardly taken root yet within our American population as a
whole; we are still without their response and encouragement. We are still
in danger of losing control over the vehicle of progress which our time
has created. The misuse of the machine tends to flatten the mind, leveling
off individual diversity and independence of thought and action. But diversity
is, after all, the very source of true democracy! But factors of expediency,
like high-pressure salesmanship and money-making as an end in itself,
have impaired the individual's capacity to seek and understand the deeper
potentialities of life from which the culture of a nation develops. Our
sense of neighborly integration, our love of beauty as a basic life requirement,
are underdeveloped. We need, on the one hand, distinct diversity of minds
resulting from intensive individual performance, and, on the other, a
common idiom of regional expression springing from the cumulative experience
of successive generations who gradually weed out the superfluous and the
merely arbitrary from the essential and typical. Such a voluntary selective
process, far from producing dull uniformity, should give many individuals
a chance to contribute their own individual variation of a common theme
and so help to evolve again the integrated pattern for living that we
lost with the advent of the machine age. The two opposites--individual
variety, and a common denominator expressed by creating form symbols of
human fellowship--need to be reconciled to each other. The degree of success
in shaping and fusing these opposites indicates the depth of culture reached
and is the very yardstick for judging the architectural achievements of
a period.

Our scientific age of specialization, with its glorious
achievements for our physical life, has simultaneously brought about confusion
and a general dissolution of context; it has resulted in shrinking and
fragmentizing life.

But there are indications that we are slowly moving
away from overspecialization and its perilous atomizing effect on the
social coherence of the community. Many ideas and discoveries of our present
civilization are wholly concerned with finding again the relationship
between the phenomena of the universe, which scientists had so far viewed
only in isolation from neighboring fields. The scientist has contributed
new knowledge of the identity of matter and energy. The artist, the architect,
has learned to express visibly with inert materials a new dimension--time
and motion. Are we on the way to regaining a comprehensive vision of the
oneness of the world which we had let disintegrate? In the gigantic task
of its reunification, the architect and planner will have to play a big
role. He must be well trained not ever to lose a total vision in spite
of the wealth of specialized knowledge which he has to absorb and integrate.
He must comprehend land, nature, man and his art as one great entity.
In our mechanized society, we should patiently emphasize that we are still
a world of men, that man in his natural environment must be the focus
of all planning and building.

If we, the architects and planners, envisage the
strategic goal of our profession in its vast complexity, it indeed embraces
the civilized life of man in all its major aspects: the destiny of the
land, the forests, the water, the cities and the countryside; the knowledge
of man through biology, sociology and psychology; law, government and
economics, art, architecture and engineering. As all are interdependent,
we cannot consider them separately in compartments. Their connectedness,
directed toward a cultural entity, is undoubtedly of greater importance
for success in planning our environment than finding ever-so-perfect practical
solutions for limited objectives. If we agree on this rank of order, then
the emphasis must be on the "composite mind," as we may call it, developed
through a process of continuous cross-checking and balancing, rather than
on the specialized expert who shuns responsibility for the whole and divides
his brain into tight compartments.

To rebalance our life and to humanize the impact
of the machine, we must give the creative architect, the artist, his chance
to reassert himself as the prototype of "whole man." As soon as the longing
for "total architecture," as I like to call it, becomes more universal,
there will grow a demand for "experiments in living," for courageous practical
attempts to examine the living value of our building and planning habits
by setting up organic model communities where our new living standards
can be tested and demonstrated. As soon as the average American, with
his innate enthusiasm and readiness to act, will feel the need for a more
beautiful and more organically coherent environment as an expression of
his pride and participation in our democracy, then he may cause a chain
reaction conducive to solving our great and complicated task, to have
both, unity and diversity, the two indispensable components of a cultural
order.